Hey all,

As I have been developing rules for my campaign, I have a system where you create named armies (for example, the Swords of Denethor.

These armies can gain experience and upgrades, and individual troops within the army can gain traits as well and become heroes.

I was wondering if anyone had a good system for keeping track of things like this. For example, if an Army loses 4 troops in a battle, how would you record that? And then if they recruit maybe 6 troops later? And for individual troops, how would you record that as well? I'd likely name them and mark a specific model, but due to a lack of models many armies would share troops with the same pose.

Any suggestions? All is appreciated

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Forlorn, I remove my Iron Guard from the pile of Goblins; just staring at that 6 with disbelief.

I like the idea of creating unique armies. Its something I really liked about games like Mordheim. If I were to be creating a campaign like this, I'd make it somewhat similar to Mordheim, essentially one maybe two SBG warbands would be the playable size.
https://www.hong-crewet.dk/Mordheim/roster.pdf here's a link to the roster (to give you an idea if you dont know Mordheim). The warriors are on the first page, heros on the second. The boxes are for marking experience, and the bold boxes are when they earn a feat (one of the feats is to become a hero).

As for record keeping, probably an Excel spreadsheet is your best bet. This would also have the added benifit of haivng a column for what Warband the hero/warrior is a member, and then generating a printable summary page.

If your armies contain not many models perhaps personalise each one: perhaps chip a corner off a guy's shield to show he's been in many battles or paint some (very sparing) blood on a guy's tunic. This would get a lot more complicated with larger armies though.

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A ginger bread and born.

I really like games like Mordheim for this sort of customization and story telling. And I've been thinking of making something similar for a campaign too.

For model Identification, you could do a few things.

1. Paint numbers on the base, like 1 is Minis Tirith Warrior Jonny and 2 is Minas Tirith Warrior Bobbie. I did this for my Mordheim war band, made it look like the dwarves had chiseled it into their stone base
2. Paint the rim of the base a colour.
3. Customise the model, change a sword to an axe or add a backpack
4. If its a sifi game you could cut a piece of plastic card and paint it to look like a data pad (with a number displayed on it)

As for the paperwork,

1. Something like the Mordheim or the Battle Company roster (attached) would work well.
2. Alternatively, you could whip up an excel spreadsheet that keeps track of all of the warriors in the warband (and if you have something like defend the villiage while the rest are out you can account for this here too)
   
   

I work a lot with excel spreadsheet macros (the buttons that can do some suepr technical stuff) so its probably a lot easier for me to say "Just whip it up" than it would be for you.